PC's Opinion: GE - Why They Don’t Get It

This opinion piece is the sixth in a new series of "PC's
Weekly Opinion" - a pithy, heavily-spiced editorial from
Peter Cresswell that can be delivered to your in-box once a
week. If you like what you read then feel free to forward it
to everyone you've ever met, and to subscribe at
www.libz.org . And if you don’t like what you read, then
learn to get over it.

[A recycled column today, updated from an
article originally appearing in The Free Radical of August
1999.]

A restive audience sits shivering in a school
gymnasium on a cold Auckland evening. They hear a scientist
painstakingly explaining the exciting new technology of gene
modification, yet they are not listening. His words cannot
reach them. "What about my children?" they sneer, their
faces fixed in derision. "How do you know you aren't
poisoning them?" The scientist knows he could not have
communicated any clearer, yet he will leave the meeting
knowing he has failed.

A businessman at a public debate
tells a well-fed audience that this technology will be able
to feed the world. He is mocked with sarcastic laughter when
an opponent points out he is "only interested in
profit!"

A grocery association produces a pamphlet for
customers answering questions on GE foods. The pamphlet is
rubbished by anti-GE activists as "biased, undisguised
propaganda focussing on possible future benefits while
ignoring the environmental and heath risks." "Many doctors,"
complain the activists, "warn these foods could cause new
toxins, allergies, or even [gasp] super-viruses." [Emphasis
added.]

A politician tells an audience that she wishes to
ban this technology until it has been thoroughly tested, and
in the same breath says she wishes to ban testing. Her
audience enthusiastically applaud this brazen contradiction.
Her party calls for a moratorium on the use of the
technology until a Royal Commission has inquired into it -
and then protests when the Commission finds that the
technology should proceed.

Activists analyse the minutiae
of rumour, gossip and innuendo surrounding GE plants, foods
and crops, yet seem to be missing the big picture.

What is
going on? While businesses produce more and more genetically
modified products and scientists research exciting new
applications, their technology-hating opponents still seem
to be winning the debate. The reason – it will surprise many
to learn – is not for any lack of science or any shortage of
marketing muscle, and nor is it any reflection on the merits
of the technology itself.

The reason is not lack of
science. It is lack of philosophy.

Oh, come now, you will
say – what’s that errant abstract nonsense got to do with
this battle? And the answer is: everything. What the
Luddites rely on is an audience with a taste for errant
nonsense - with a disrespect for scientific certainty, a
taste for the arbitrary, a disgust for profits, a
willingness to ignore logical contradictions, and an
overriding hatred for mankind and its achievements.

That
recipe describes many New Zealanders – and most politicians
– and the only way these philosophical ideas can be defeated
is with better philosophy. At the moment, the scientific
defenders are talking past the Luddites because they are
both talking about different things. One is talking
philosophy, and the other is not.

What technology's
defenders must do is to defend the ideas at the level they
are being attacked - the philosophical level. This means
defending scientific certainty, rejecting arbitrary
assertions, praising profits as moral, respecting logic, and
honouring man’s achievements. There is only one philosophy
that consistently defends all of these - Ayn Rand’s
philosophy of Objectivism - and without it, the Luddites
will win.

Certainty

Scientists will assuredly lose the
argument if they argue strictly on scientific grounds.
Defenders of the technology must defend the certainty of
their scientific inquiry - that it is based, not on wild
speculation nor arbitrary assertions nor yet on the numbers
of scientists who assert it - but on cold, hard, brute
facts. Technology's attackers litter their statements with
arbitrary attacks full of ‘might-be’, ‘could-be’, and
‘could-lead-to’ - and just observe how often you hear the
speculative words 'may,' 'might, and 'perhaps' in the
anti-GE literature. Technology's defenders must crusade
against these arbitrary assertions, and argue for a renewed
respect for certainty, and for the facts.

This is a
philosophical battle, and one the arbitrarians are currently
winning for lack of a philosophical rejoinder. Scientists
must defend their scientific certainty against the claims of
the arbitrarians; in other words they must vigorously assert
the truth that what they know, they know with full
certainty. If they don’t defend the notion of certainty
philosophically (and ensure that they are certain when they
need to be), then the pseudo-scientists and scientifically
illiterate need only chant 'you don't know for sure, do you'
for scientists to retreat to the lab and shut the doors.

The arbitrary should be seen for what it is: in the words
of philosopher Leonard Peikoff as "a claim put forth in the
absence of evidence of any sort…with no relation to reality
or to human cognition." Arbitrary statements are in fact
worse than false statements. False statements contradict the
evidence, but at least the evidence is addressed. Arbitrary
statements by contrast offer no evidence, have no tie to
reality, no content, and therefore no significance. In any
debate, the arbitrarians should be required to either put up
their evidence, or to shut up.

Profit

"You don’t want to
feed the world, you’re only interested in your profits" crow
the Luddites, and in the face of this assault on their
morality businessmen cower, unwilling to accept the truth
that they should only be interested in their
profits.

Businessmen evasively apologising for their
profits suggests dishonesty where there is none. This
technology can feed the world; it will vastly increase crop
yields; it does reduce the need for herbicides and
pesticides; it will allow growers to grow more on less land.
It promises a vast range of exciting new products; it will –
and should – earn enormous profits for the producers of the
technology – AND THAT MUST NOT BE APOLOGISED FOR!

Further, the potential for humungous profits provide the
best defence for food safety – no company will make huge
profits by unwittingly killing its customers - and profits
rightfully reward producers – why the hell else should they
produce. Profits are moral – they have, after all, been
earned.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, two
businessmen hold a press conference; they are opening a new
railway line that has been violently opposed by the
politically correct. "The reporters who came to the press
conference," goes the story, "had been trained to think that
their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature
of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience
for some public figure who made utterances about the public
good, in phrases carefully calculated to have no meaning."
Pressured by the reporters to defend her reasons for opening
the unpopular railway line, Dagny Taggart says: "Would you
oblige me by taking this down verbatim? Miss Taggart says –
quote – I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt
Line. I will have earned it. Close quote. Thank you so
much."

What a contrast to the manner in which the
technology of genetic modification is currently being
defended. And what a breath of fresh air if we could hear
that today from the producers of genetic technology.

Moral
Treason, and the Sanction of the Victim

The New Zealand
government has allowed the technology to proceed, but only
with serious shackles and restrictions on its use.
Scientists and producers have been pathetically grateful,
tugging their forelocks as they meekly concede to the
shackles. This is yet another example of what Ayn Rand
called the "moral treason" of conservatives - their
willingness to endlessly compromise only to find in the end
that they have eventually sold out their own values. Faced
with opposition conservatives will happily shackle
themselves, and sanction their own
destruction.

Businessmen and scientists must realise that
if don't tell the truth about this epoch-making technology
by crusading for it - rather than apologising for it as they
are now, or 'spinning' unwelcome facts rather than fronting
up with the unvarnished truth - then they will assuredly
continue to suffer ‘death by a thousand cuts.'

There is
an interesting parallel with the technology of nuclear
power, which was unveiled in the fifties with the promise of
almost infinite power for extremely low cost. Nuclear
arguably offered cheaper, cleaner power more easily and
safely produced than any other method of production. Its
defenders however – conservative to a man – willingly
accepted the compromises asked for by their opponents, and
in doing so regulated their own industry into virtual
bankruptcy. Costs to produce new atomic power plants were
raised so high by regulatory control that it was transformed
from the cheapest form of power known to man, to the most
expensive.

By accepting the shackles, the defenders of
nuclear power willingly sanctioned their own destruction.
And in a final irony, when uneconomic plants were being
mothballed, Luddites began arguing that the plants’
mothballing demonstrated that they were right about the evil
technology all along!

Conservatives strangled this
industry with their own compromises, strengthening their
opponents in the process - we are about to witness a repeat
performance with genetic technology. The regulatory
compromises being accepted threaten to strangle the industry
as effectively as they did with the nuclear industry. Again
we will see the victims sanctioning their own destruction by
their own moral treason.

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